


Death is a Dance

by worddancer



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Buffy deserved better, Character Study, F/F, F/M, Faith deserved better, Faith is better than she thinks she is, Hero isn't a blessing, Immortality, It's a curse, Multi, OT3, Other, Souled Spike (BtVS), Spike deserved better, They all deserved better, coming together, facing the end of the world
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-25
Updated: 2019-03-25
Packaged: 2019-12-07 14:21:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18236069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/worddancer/pseuds/worddancer
Summary: Buffy and Faith were decades past childhood and still needed to get carded at half the bars they went to. Buffy more than Faith. Faith always wore her darkness on the surface. Still they couldn't stay among the young slayers anymore- the couldn't watch more children become heroes.Faith wondered when the word hero stopped being something to aspire too and started sounding like a curse.Buffy wondered when she ever believed being a hero meant anything but being soaked in blood.





	Death is a Dance

Buffy died in an earthquake. She was scared, she thought she was alone, and she had been fifteen. Now every time she feels the earth tremble beneath her she feels the same numbness in her body. No matter how far she comes she knows she’s still the fifteen-year-old girl who died on the night of the big dance. She never did tell her mother she died. She never had a chance to tell her she died a second time.

Buffy knew Spike had been right.

Every slayer had a death wish  
.  
Or something similar.

Every slayer got tired, got a little slower, got a little less.

That was all the evil needed.

One good day.

Buffy hated sleeping alone. She would wake up disoriented reaching for a weapon- wondering which person in her family was in danger now. When someone else was in the bed at least she knew that single person was safe. For over fifteen years who ever shared her bed was both the safest and most at-risk person in the world.

After the First the Scoobies took turns sleeping in her room for the first few nights, after everything, after Sunnydale plunged into the Earth. After that they all piled in the same room. Willow, Buffy, Xander and Dawn all squeezed into the bed. They needed to be close. Needed to know they survived and remember the ones who didn’t. The Potentials turned Slayers did the same thing. They huddled in a few rooms together, bodies packed too tight to be comfortable but still not tight enough to keep the nightmares away.

Faith and Robin found their own room. They’d gone through life with no one and didn’t know how to add new people now.  
Sometimes tragedy needs to be experienced together.

Sometimes it needs to be honored alone.

Buffy at fifteen crawled her way out of her grave. Or was she twenty-one? Did she ever leave the shrine of crumbled stone and earth? Everyone seemed to forget the first time she died. She didn't hate them for it though. There had been so much death since then. So much pain and suffering. So much blood.  
  
Besides Giles hadn't loved her like a daughter then. He looked at the Slayer, as the girl called to die, and sent her to her death. He respected her, but respect is different than love isn't it? The Schoobies weren't family yet.

Still it seemed Death only gave you back once before it decided to keep something too.

Buffy died in an earthquake and she died swan diving off a tower. She made every potential a slayer and sent two lovers to their (second, third) deaths. The First took her face for a reason. Every time she made a choice someone died. Someone suffered. Sometimes it was someone- something- evil but they still died. Life was still snuffed out by her hands.

Of course, Death seemed to like Angel and Spike a lot less than it liked Buffy because Death kept spitting them back into her life. She thought Spike must be some kind of sick masochist for all the times he walked back to her. She thought Death must have a sick sense of humor for giving him the option.

"I've been alive a bit longer than you, and dead a lot longer than that..."

It took Spike three years to come back to her in Cleveland where the Scoobies plus Dawn, plus Faith, plus Robin, plus Andrew had settled down. Angel, Cordelia and the rest had stayed in LA- defense across the nation. They were hoping to add a base on the east coast soon. The Council might be dead, but the deep pockets had to be passed on somewhere.

It took them over a decade to figure out that neither Buffy or Faith were aging. Thirty plus years of life- twenty of them spent fighting and something should show. Something besides the scars that traced their bodies. Their faces should have lines starting to fan out around the edged of their eyes and mouths from worry. From laughter. From living.

They still looked the exact same as when Buffy crawled out of the grave her second time.

It seemed her mortality got left in the grave with her coffin. Well hers and Faith's.

Willow and Dawn researched for a year before they threw their hands up. The best guess was that Faith and Buffy were intrinsically tied by virtue of being the last called Slayers. The last ones bound by death. Something from yanking Buffy out of heaven. Something when they tapped into the demon that made the Slayer line entered them, staved off Death and aging for them. Something.

Buffy walked away for six months after that. She called every few weeks, her voice hollow and silted. The Scoobies and crew followed her trek across America by the demons she killed and left in her wake. Some she left alive to warn others. Some she left alive because they weren't hurting the humans. But any threat? She walked in with her Scythe and a few stakes and challenged death to try to take her again.

It never did. Even a vague death wish couldn't stand up to twenty years of training. One day maybe- if she got old. If her body slowed but that was never going to be a risk was it?

Faith stayed in Cleveland and tried to deal.

She didn't- she walked into as many vampire nests with nothing but two stakes and a push up bra and no back up. That's what started the fights with Robin.

Spike didn't walk after Buffy, but he patrolled the city like he was the only defender in it. Faith pretended she didn't know he stood outside every nest she slaughtered. Her and B were close now. They'd buried their collective hatchets and Spike wasn't going to let anything happen to his lovers’ closets friends. To B's family.

Faith remembered when she sorted Buffy firmly into the category of Good and herself into the category of Bad. She didn't think she was bad anymore- she just didn't think either of them were good anymore either. Buffy still looked like a twenty-year-old California Sun Goddess, but Faith now knew how desperate and tarnished that alter had always been.

Buffy had always been soaked in blood and death even when she wore virginal white. It just took Faith almost ten years to figure it out.  
By the time Buffy returned to Cleveland Robin has moved all of his things to a different room. Buffy didn't comment.

By the time Buffy returned to Cleveland she had fought or fucked her way across the United States three times. Faith didn't comment on the beautiful golden girl losing her shine. Spike just looked at them standing side by side and wondered when anyone had ever thought these two couldn't light the world on fire if they wanted to.

When you were faced with forever good and bad somehow seemed like the most important and the least important thing to think of. Spike didn't like thinking of Buffy getting closer to the blurred line as time went on.

For the first decade he liked to forget that he knew how intimately she knew the line from the beginning. Faith liked to pretend that she never knew where the line existed in the first place. Buffy liked to pretend she'd once been the golden girl.

They all liked to pretend at first.

But then Willow looked a decade, a score, thirty years older than Buffy's forever early twenties face. They didn't know exactly when the Original Slayers stopped aging. There wasn't much of a difference between twenty and twenty-two.

Xander looked like he could be Buffy's father.

Dawn looked like she could be Buffy's much older sister, her aunt, her mother.

Robin left for London long ago. Slayers across the world. Protection from the demons of hell.

Young girls still promised to a fight they could never refuse.

Young girls dying trying to save the world.

That part never ended. Except Buffy and Faith didn't age and they didn't get to die. The oldest and the youngest slayers. How the years began to wear on them.

After twenty years Buffy looked at Faith. They were in their forties. They got carded unironically at half the bars they went too. They moved between training campuses, so no civilian could learn their secret. Spike followed them, fought with them, trained the slayers and wore his soul with the dignity of a man who fought for it.

Spike and Buffy fucked and fought hard, fast and dirty. Xander started putting in steel welded beds after five years. He also threatened to push Spike in the sun if the pair made one innuendo to said beds. Buffy promised no inunuendo's as long as Xander didn't let anything slip about him fucking her little sister.

The old friends shook hands and called it fair.

Spike fucked like the demon that lived inside him and Buffy gave as good as she took. There was a bit of a demon inside of them after all. A demon that clawed, screamed, begged and fought it's right to come to the surface and be free. Nails scratched down skin that healed by morning and kiss and teeth shaped bruises dissipated as they bloomed.

Faith pretended she didn't get herself off to the idea of the golden sun and the dark knight crashing together. Or at least for the first twenty years she pretended. They were all so good at pretending sometimes.

After twenty years Buffy turned to Faith and asked her to get as close to running as they ever would. Travel and fight. Live and die by their immortality and desire to make the world a little safer.

(Even after all these years parts of them were the fifteen-year-old girls who'd been promised a hero's death. They'd die saving the world from the pits of hell. They were Chosen.)

They were children destined to die because of mans fear.

They believed they could be heroes.

Buffy and Faith were decades past childhood and still needed to get carded at half the bars they went to. Buffy more than Faith. Faith always wore her darkness on the surface. Still they couldn't stay among the young slayers anymore- the couldn't watch more children become heroes.

Faith wondered when the word hero stopped being something to aspire too and started sounding like a curse.

Buffy wondered when she ever believed being a hero meant anything but being soaked in blood.

Still they were the Chosen Two and that meant power in their world. Any demon not hurting people was to be left in peace by order of the Two. Willow, Xander and Dawn had seen enough over the years to agree. The new slayers learned fast. The Chosen Two and a souled vamp started walking the earth.

Andrew made them all have movie night for years and once Dr. Who was rebooted he made them all watch it together. Buffy remembered watching Martha walk the Earth.

Two slayers and a vamp walk in to a demon nest...

She'd heard worse jokes over the years.

It only took a couple of months after they left, walked away, ran, fought, killed, whatever it was that they were doing, before Buffy grabbed Faith and pulled her in for a messy kiss after a kill. The kiss was all tongue and teeth and broken promises made to girls too scared to do anything but fight. It was just a kiss, it was so much more than just a kiss.

Spike left the shitty hotel they were currently living out of- claiming he had a blood bank to rob- and left the Chosen Two to their devices.  
When he got back the bruises from their fucking still dotted their skin, but the air seemed just a little more settled, a little more solid.  
Faith asked him, after that first time, how he felt about it. She knew one of the biggest problems with Dru had been her constantly running back to Angelus.

"It's not sharing when you're adding to the mix and making something better love."

Spike called her Love and Buffy Pet and Faith wondered somedays if that helped them remember they were human still.

Were they human still?

Fifty years after Sunnydale found them in a New York club. It amazed Faith how much things changed with the passing of time and how many things stayed the same. As long as there was music there would be pulsing bodies throwing themselves at the mercy of a DJ. The trio was taking a night off from active hunting but a crowd like this always promised some oppurtunistic slaying. Buffy grabbed Faith's hand and dragged her to the dance floor, blonde hair swinging in time to the music, in time to Buffy's hips. Faith followed, she'd follow this woman to hell or to heaven.

Buffy turned her back to Faith and started to shimmy and pulse to the beat the DJ spun and Faith let her body follow the rhythm, hands on the blonde girls’ hips. When she looked up she found Spike's eyes on them and a smirk that promised a fun time when they made it back to their current crash pad.  
  
Maybe it didn't matter if they were human when Buffy moved like this and Spike looked at them like that. Maybe it didn't matter if Buffy wasn't the Golden Goddess and Faith wasn't the Bad Girl and Spike wasn't the scariest thing on the street. Maybe it didn't matter that they were going to spend forever chasing nightmares hoping one less child would be called hero. Maybe it didn't matter that hero was a promise soaked in blood.

Maybe all that mattered was they had this, they had tonight and a thousand tomorrows.


End file.
